Kramer was born into a well-to-do professional family in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1935. He completed a B.A. at Yale in 1957 and served in the army for a year after graduating. In 1958, he began a career in the entertainment industry, working first for the William Morris Agency and then for Columbia Pictures. His first professional writing was the screenplay for the 1969 movie adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, which he also produced and for which he received an Academy Award nomination.

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Kramer gained prominence in the world of gay writing in 1978, when his novel Faggots was published. A scathing satire of the gay circuit in Manhattan and on Fire Island, the novel traces the life and neuroses of Fred Lemish, a middle-aged Jewish gay man looking for love in a world that only wants to have sex. The world of fast-lane gay New York becomes the real subject of the book, and Kramer's narrative focuses on the drug and alcohol abuse, the sado-masochism and the promiscuity that he sees as both typical and reprehensible.

The novel met with immediate hostility from reviewers in both the gay and straight press, yet ironically went on to become a best-seller. In 1987, when the novel was reissued, politics and disease had forced many changes in the community Kramer lampooned, and both gay and straight readers were considerably more laudatory of the book.

Although Faggots marked an important breakthrough novel for gay publishing, Kramer himself will most likely be remembered as an AIDS activist. In 1981, he cofounded Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York, the first community-based AIDS service organization in America. Disenchanted with what he perceived to be the lethal dangers of an uncontrollable AIDS bureaucracy, he founded AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1988, which became and remains one of the most powerful direct action political groups in America.

Spurred by his own HIV positivity and his work in the AIDS field, Kramer wrote The Normal Heart in 1986, one of the first artistic responses to the AIDS crisis. The play, which established Kramer as a dramatist, received the Dramatists Guild Marton Award, the City Lights Award, the Sarah Siddons Award for the best play of the year, and a nomination for an Olivier Award.

The Normal Heart tells the story of Ned Weeks, an AIDS activist who defies the AIDS service establishment and preaches for an extreme response to AIDS, including sexual abstinence. Like Faggots, The Normal Heart polarized the gay community, but unlike Faggots, it has been universally received as a major work of art.

Kramer's most recent writings have been direct political polemics, all of which have been gathered in Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist (1989). He continues to produce theatrical pieces, such as "The Destiny of Me" (1992), which extends the story of Ned Weeks, and some short fiction; however, at this point, there is little doubt that he will be best remembered as the man who almost single-handedly began the gay political response to AIDS in America.

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